The U.S. House of Representatives has decided that the country can’t afford several federally funded research programs.

The list includes the entire political science portfolio at the National Science Foundation, as well as a $10-million NSF program on climate change education. The House would also pull the plug on the American Community Survey, a monthly questionnaire from the Census Bureau that has replaced the long form of the decennial census. And it voted to withhold funds from the Obama Administration’s effort to implement a National Ocean Policy (NOP).

The moves were included in amendments to a bill approved today on a largely party-line, 247-to-163 vote that funds the commerce and justice departments as well as NSF, NASA, and other independent agencies.

This is an intriguing, if not pixieish reason for cutting these funds,

But House Republicans say that they represent the type of duplicate and/or unnecessary spending that has led to a $1.5 trillion annual deficit and a $15 trillion federal debt.

Science funding is not the reason for the deficit.

The funds they tried to cut represent less than one tenth of one percent of federal expenditures. There are four major reasons for our current debt situation: the war in Iraq that conservative put on the grand kids credit card, the war in Afghanistan that conservatives put on the same credit card, the Bush tax cuts and conservatives driving the economy into a ditch.

NOP supporters, however, disputed those claims. “The core approach of the National Ocean Policy is to improve stewardship of our oceans, coasts, islands, and Great Lakes by directing government agencies with differing mandates to coordinate and work better together,” said Representative Norman Dicks (D-WA). “The National Ocean Policy creates no new authorities.”

Our oceans represent billions of dollars in revenue and provide about 20% of the total protein requirements of the U.S. It might be a good idea, family values and all, to study and protect this vital resource. Conservatives just have a feeling somewhere around their pancreas maybe, that protecting this invaluable resource is not worth a tiny percentage of federal expenditures. These are for the most part the same conservatives who spent three trillion dollars to invade and rebuild Iraq. These are also the same conservatives spending hundreds of millions of dollars – private and public trying to implement the agenda similar to Iranian fundamentalists, Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting women’s reproductive rights — banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Grand Ayatollah is probably very pleased that U.S. Republicans are helping in the world wide spread of his agenda.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality — of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

The first drug shown to prevent HIV infection won the endorsement of a panel of U.S. federal advisers, clearing the way for a landmark approval in the 30-year fight against the virus that causes AIDS.

Piss off a conservative, a libertarian or a fundamentalist today, just think. Cambridge Ideas – Strange Seas of Thought

A journey into Wordsworth’s mind and the process of creation. We know about the experiments that have led to great scientific discoveries is widely recognized. But how much do we understand about the same processes in the arts? When the poet William Wordsworth died in 1850, few if none of the thousands of lines of poetry he left had escaped constant revision and alteration, and many of his most famous poems were never published. Cambridge researcher Ruth Abbott draws on the notebooks in which he left them to investigate the creative processes, attempts, and failures that go up to make great works of art.